I own a rainbow of beautiful colors, mostly from Diamine, but what I really miss a a truly black ink for formal days. I have a big bottle of Parker Quink Black, but I almost never use it as it’s actually a middle-to-dark-gray ink even with my flowiest pens.
So what are your favorite, deeply saturated black inks?
Bonus points if it’s (very) affordable and easily available in Europe (so no noodlers).
Love Perle Noire. Well behaved, but nicely saturated and lubricated. Pelikan is pretty good too, almost a supersaturated brown IIRC. Waterman is not amazing, but super safe and nicer than Parker. Sheaffer looks very dark, but feathers on anything except really excellent paper.
The best looking and most interesting feeling black ink I ever used was an old bottle of Doctor brand black, made by Hero. It was like writing with an oil slick, both in appearance and feel, and while a bit of a pain to clean, it didn’t seem to clog pens. It was the only bottle of ink I’ve ever had go moldy though, so I’m not surprised it’s hard to find these days.
Waterman’s is not very saturated, it’s more on the reddish side, and it isn’t that cheap. Perle Noire doesn’t have any issues I know of with even vulcanized rubber pens (though I wouldn’t keep them inked for months with any modern formulation), so the “safety” is pretty good…
Pelikan is indeed brown tints that are saturated enough to look kind of black on most papers.